PD madness!!

here's a snapshot of some of the objects I'm working with for the audio input component on the final project. Right now my computer is a mess of help screens.

improvements and discoveries

I fixed the problem with my serial connection. Apparently Processing was looking at the wrong serial port (it tried to find an input on my modem's serial port). I changed the input to port [3], which is the usb serial, and everything worked ok. Additionally, I've been trying to figure out how to get an analog signal into PD and create a data stream. I finally realized that the adc~ object connect to an env~ object, and then I can output a data stream in dB. I used the data stream (which ranged from 60-79dB) to control a few different images in the GEM extended examples in Pure Data. It was pretty cool to control an image with a sound input but I'm still a little bit far from my goal of creating a visual artwork based on the sound. I need to figure out how to scale my sounds so that I can have a wider data stream to control different visual elements. Perhaps some visual examples will follow this post...

serial problems

I've been exploring options for my final project and I settled on an idea featuring MIDI, Serial communication, and some sort of audio imput and spectral processing in Pure Data. Unfortunately, I've hit a roadblock on the very first step. For some reason, when I try to open up a serial port in Terminal, I get weird error messages. Here is what I've done so far. I opened up

/Applications/Processing\ 0133/libraries/serial/macosx_setup.command; exit

and then attempted to type in a new terminal shell the following:

screen/dev/tty.usbserial-5B1 9600

// but I get an error message that says this: No such file or directory


Any thoughts? I will try to solve this problem ASAP. In the meantime I'll start to post some sketches for a final project prototype.

final project observations

serial communications lab 5 part one

I seem to be having trouble with my serial port when trying to use the arduino and the Processing environment. Stay tuned for a working serial lab once the serial port issue is resolved.

One more added note about the midterm proj

I know my blog seems a bit disjointed right now (considering my lab assignments are all out of order and I'm adding another note about my midterm assignment which we finished about a week ago), however, I must note that for the speed control component on the interactive bike light, we decided to go with a really simple design based around the brake as a switch. If the brake is pressed hard enough, two contacts in a switch are connected and an analog input signal is sent to the arduino, which basically tells the LED sequence to speed up. Our original design was going to implement a spedometer attached to the back wheel as our sensor, but for the prototype's purpose the simple switch idea seemed more feasible.

lab 6 motor control

Here is my lab for controlling a motor using the arduino. I have attached a video of me turning on a motor using a 12 V external power supply. The video is kind of raw, and I did end up building the gearbox to use with the motor but in the end I didn't really have enough time to get the whole thing on video again with the gearbox. I was having a bit of trouble getting the motor to start with a 9V DC supply, and luckily I had a 12V DC supply lying around here so I plugged that in and powered it all up and it worked just fine. I'm not really sure if I fully understand why the 9V supply didn't work, because the motor was rated for 3 Volts, so 9 would have been just fine to get everything up to speed.